Dean Esmay compares incorrect preductions with incorrect timing:

Sometimes when people predict the future, and we think they're wrong, it turns out that they were only premature in their predictions. Heck, you could even argue that the entire "dot-com bubble" was predicated on only one fatal mistake: it wasn't a mistake based on the notion that the internet would become ubiquitous and ever more a part of people's everyday lives. They were just about 7-10 years premature in their expectations of what was reasonable.

It's quite a good point. We often expect things to happen a lot quicker than they do. We expect a somewhat gradual-but-consistent implementation when instead it will languish for a while and then the change will strike like lightening. It usually, though not always, requires the capitulation of whatever market-force opposes the change. For instance, record companies tried to deny the imminent digitization and computerization of music. They thought if they could shut down Napster, online music and the mp3 would go away. Napsterites, on the other hand, often thought that the change was right around the corner. Instead, nothing happened for quite a few years and then suddenly the dam burst and in the span of a year record companies offered legal ways to listen to music online and in non-media digital form.

The same may be true for Linux. I am a Linux-skeptic from a market standpoint. I believe that Microsoft will dominate desktops for many years to come. I partially believe this because of the Linux false-starts that I've seen. Linux boosters have constantly claimed "We're ready!" when they, in fact, are not. They're still not. At some point, though, I do believe that their software will be ready for the average user in time. But that won't be enough just like the technology for internet business or digital music was not enough. The market will have to come to terms with the notion of open-source software and figure out some way around MS Office's dominance in office software. It could be that they never will and fifty years from now Windows will still be, more or less, at the top.

One thing that could fit in to the greater scheme of things is web-based software, which is the subject of Esmay's piece:

Back in the 1990s the concept of the so-called "thin client" was all the rage. The idea was that every machine would be networked, and that there was just no need for most people to have their own fully functional computer; they should be able to draw most of the resources they needed over the network, and shouldn't need local hard drives or advanced processing power on their desktops. [...]

The advent of free webmail services which offer hundreds of megabytes of storage for free was the first thing that had me thinking that this can be taken seriously. Increasingly, there's no good reason to want to keep your email on your computer. Indeed, there's good reason not to keep it there, since you don't have to worry about backups, and it's nice to be able to get at your mail from any computer. I've been using computers since the late 1970s, and I never thought I'd give up having my own mail client, but for two years now I've been entirely using webmail--because I like to be able to get at my mail from any computer anywhere on the planet with an internet connection.

They said the same thing when I was in college and by the timeline they gave it should have happened by now. It took a little longer to get broadband to be as commonplace as it's becoming.

On the whole, though, I am not convinced that it is as imminent as some believe or that it will ever be as complete as they think it will. The first barrier they face is internet inconsistency. Last night, for instance, my high-speed internet fluctuated between being down and being really slow. It doesn't happen all that often, but often enough for it to be a real problem if when that happens I cannot do anything on my computer. We're still pretty early on in the broadbanding of the Internet so they will get a lot of this sorted out, but the piecemail way in which we're making it happens suggests to me that we won't have complete reliability (or near-complete, which we have for power and water and so on) for some to time come.

Beyond that, I'm not sure that it will ever completely make sense to have the applications run on some central server. Processing power is cheap and getting cheaper by the day. I'm not sure it will ever be cheaper to be moving these things back and forth across the Internet, even if it takes roughly the same amount of time. The same with hard-drive space -- no one is going to run out of harddrive space based on applications alone.

What I see happening is co-existence between local applications and webapps. Most office productivity suites will have both a software and web component. You use your installed MS Office when you're at home, but when you're on a computer that has a different version or different software package, you will use it on the web. Online music supplier Rhapsody already does this, to an extent. You can either download their application or you can listen to it on Rhapsody.com (though at last check their implementation of Rhapsody.com needed work).

While the reasons for software apps being located elsewhere on your machine are limited, having your files stored on a central server and accessible from anywhere is a different matter altogether. Being able to store one's entire music, movie, or book collection to be accessible from anywhere on any computer would truly be innovative. I see OSes moving towards making the integration and synchronization between local and central storage space more seemless.

To use Rhapsody as an example again, right now you can either listen to the music through streaming audio or you can download it for free and listen to it locally (though once you stop subscribing it will stop playing). Having everything available from a central server is great, but so is having it local so that it's not taking up large amounts of bandwidth.

One of Dean's commented brought up an interesting thing:

The companies delivering these services are looking for a way to make money and see the current model as unacceptable- THAT is the driving force behind this on the commercial side. Software cannot be pirated if it exists only on the server side and is accessible only through paid subscription services.

It's no secret that Microsoft would much prefer a subscription model for Office and that would provide quite the incentive for software vendors to discontinue local installations. I'm not convinced that they would be successful, though. Part of the glory of open source software - even when I don't use it - is that it keeps profit vendors from moving too far away from what consumers want. Microsoft, Apple, Corel, and Adobe could all start adopting the same marketing strategy (because it's the most profitable) and we still wouldn't have to go along. That's quite comforting.

Whatever comes of it all, it will be interesting.